Guthrie didn’t say anything at first. Well, shit, Jody thought. He’s trying to figure out how to say no and be polite about it.
But he said, “Yeah, I’d like that, Jody.”
“You mean it?”
“But don’t you have to buy a gearbox in Bend? And what are you going to do about your truck?”
“Sort of a gear assembly. What am I gonna do about the truck? If I got enough change I’m gonna make a phone call.” He rooted in his pocket, came up with a handful of silver. “Won’t take a minute,” he said, and crossed the road to the Circle K. There was a pay phone just to the left of the doorway.
He made his call and when his sister-in-law answered he said, “Patty, let me talk to Line, if you please.” He waited, leaning a shoulder against the brick wall. When his brother picked up he said, “Bud, there’s a Circle K on 97 about midway between Beaver Marsh and Chemult. You know where I’m talking about?”
“What did she do, the carburetor flood out on you again?”
“No, she’s running fine,” he said. “Bud, what I’m gonna do, I’m leaving the truck right here at the Circle K. Just listen to me, will you? I got something I got to do, I’ll be gone for a while. And hey, I didn’t get up to Bend so I didn’t pick up that gear assembly and shit.” He held the receiver at arm’s length and closed his eyes, shutting out his brother’s words.
Then he said, “Look, Bud, I’m telling you where the truck’s at. You got keys so I’ll just lock it and leave my keys in the ashtray. Oh, speaking of that, there’s some cigarettes for you. Camels, a carton and an odd pack. And I’m hanging onto the money for the windmill parts, so that’s whatever it is, three hundred fifty dollars I owe you.”
He rolled his eyes skyward and listened to his brother’s response.
“Well, Bud,” he said, “all I can say is that’s how it is. You know where the truck is, and you can pick it up or not, and what it comes down to, I guess, is fuck you. Nothing personal and all, but fuck you, hoss.”
He hung up and walked over to the truck. Guthrie had crossed the road to stand in the Datsun’s shade. “One thing,” Jody said, “is if a person wants to pick up and go away, they can’t stop you.”
“Damn straight.”
He dropped his keys in the ashtray and closed it, left the unopened beer on the seat with the cigarettes, chucked the open beer into the brush at the edge of the parking lot. He rolled up the windows, locked the doors, ran a hand through his mop of bright hair and replaced his cap.
“Hard to believe that’s all there is to it,” he said. “I feel like I used to feel in high school, right before a football game. All pumped up. You ready to go?”
“Whenever you are.”
“Then let’s do it. But look, you’re the expert, you know what I mean? You’re the one walked over the mountains. Tell me if there’s something I’m doing wrong, because I don’t know a whole hell of a lot about walking.”
“It’s pretty simple,” Guthrie told him. “The main thing is you have to remember to alternate feet.”
“Left right left right.”
“That’s the idea.”
“Well, I’ll concentrate on it,” Jody said. “By an’ by, I might could get the hang of it.”
Six
In Chicago, the bus terminal in the Loop had coin-access cubicles in the restrooms where you could take a sponge bath, freshen up, and change your clothes. When Sara emerged from the ladies’ room Thom was waiting for her. Downstairs, she sat with their suitcases while he picked out a couple of paperback science fiction novels. He had already read fifty pages of one when it was time to board their bus for Salt Lake City.
They sat together four seats in back of the driver. She’d given Thom the window seat. Across the aisle, a very thin man with a sallow complexion was dosing himself with cough medicine. He had the whole seat to himself. Directly in front of him, a middle-aged couple sat holding hands. Thom looked out the window until the bus had left city traffic for the Stevenson Expressway. Then he returned to his book.
Sara sat with her eyes closed most of the time. She slept some, but it was difficult to tell where consciousness left off and sleep began. Her sleep was light and dream-ridden, her conscious periods hazy and dreamlike. Movies revealed themselves to her mind’s eye. Snatches of speech sounded in her mind. Sometimes it was of a piece with what she was seeing, sometimes not.
South and west of Joliet the bus left Route 55 for Interstate 80, the road it would stay with clear through to Salt Lake City — and, after she and Thom left it, all the way on to San Francisco. They crossed into Iowa at Davenport, and Thom nudged her awake as they moved onto the bridge across the Mississippi. She looked out the window. Her field of vision was too narrow to show her much, but when she sat back and closed her eyes she saw the entire river, from its headwaters at Lake Itasca to its delta at New Orleans. She could see, in one panoramic view, the whole great river through all its history — paddle-wheelers, Indians in war canoes, Huck and Jim on a raft, mills and factories spilling chemicals into the water, jet contrails overhead. People battling the rising waters, stacking sandbags to stop a flood. Railroad bridges, bridges for cars. Ox-drawn prairie schooners crossing on ferries. Eyes closed, her field of vision was so great that it could encompass all the river’s time and space without any shrinkage or loss of detail, and it was all in flux, all in motion, all evolving not before but behind her eyes—
“I wish you could see this,” he said.
“Oh, Thommy,” she said, and clutched his arm. “Oh, if you could see what I see—” He wanted to know what she meant and she told him about it, described what she saw and heard and sensed and felt and knew of the river.
He was in awe. “You see all that? How does it all fit at once?”
She took his book from him, pointed at the page he was reading. “How big a picture would you need to hold everything on this page?”
“A pretty big one,” he allowed, but he still couldn’t comprehend how she saw what she saw, and she didn’t know how to get it across to him.
“But it’s wonderful,” she said. “I never knew what a river was.”
“You didn’t?”
“Well, what’s a river, Thom?”
“Water going someplace, I guess. In a straight line, except sometimes they’re not straight, they meander. Bigger than a creek or a stream, and moving fast enough so there’s a current, and I think it has to be fresh water—”
“That’s a definition,” she said. “That’s how you look at a body of water and decide whether or not it’s a river, by whether or not it fits certain standards. But what’s the river?”
“What you just said. A body of water that fits certain what-you-said. Standards.”
“What part is the river? The water?”
“I guess.”
“But it’s only in the river for a while. It flows in from some other stream and flows out into the Gulf of Mexico. There’s always new water coming in and old water flowing out. So what’s the river? The land on either side is the bank of the river, the mud underneath is the bottom of the river, but what’s the river?”
“I don’t know.”
“I think the river’s a certain time and space,” she said, “and sooner or later every drop of water in the world gets to take its turn being a part of it. And then they go somewhere else. This drop goes to the Gulf, and this drop evaporates, and somebody drinks this drop—”